Slashdot Mirror
EU Plans to Tax Internet Sales
Arctic Fox writes: "In a bid to help European online sales, the EU is planning to tax online transactions. The article on Yahoo, says that the taxes will apply only to products downloaded from the internet, such as software,videos and music. They may elect to tax physical items (books, hardware,etc) at a later date. American companies will be forced to charge European customers the appropriate VAT in their home country. No details on how this will be enforced."
I worked for a dot-com in the UK which had to charge VAT on all purchases, based on the location to which it was shipping the item. The rules were different for every country -- the price threshold at which the tax applied, the tax rate itself, the types of items to which the tax applied -- and it was a nightmare to code a system which could handle every possibility. Enforcing this rule will only further discourage American companies from shipping to Europe -- something they're already aggravatingly unwilling to do.
When are governments going to grasp the idea that none of them have any jurisdiction over the Internet?
Does anyone else think that this is in return for the US stance on imported steel? I just saw an article on CNN about trade issues between the EU and the US, and thought hey, this makes sense from an EU perspective, if they are going to up barriers to exporting EU products to the US, then lets make it harder for US companies to make money from the EU - by removing the pricing advantage by addition of tax. I don't think this is really a taxation issue, I think its partial retaliation for the US imposing restrictions on imports into the US from the EU.